Industrial Connections

The Industrial Revolution started in Britain’s factories, but its innovations stretched globally. Coal, steam engines, steel, and agricultural advances made the Industrial Revolution possible. They created connections that enabled this massive change in how humans work and live.

How did these connections shape the lives of people in Britain? How did these changes affect the rest of the world? We’ll start by examining how industrial production changed British economics, labor, and culture. Then we’ll look at how three valuable materials changed communities, production, and trade all over the world.

Different people in different places experienced the Industrial Revolution in different ways. Wealthy and middle-class Europeans gained new wealth and opportunity. For people in Europe’s colonies, industrialization led to exploitation by European imperialists seeking more profit. In this case, Europeans took resources from colonies and treated the people in those colonies poorly. For the working poor in Europe, industrialization brought new opportunities but also brutal working conditions. In the nineteenth century, life expectancy dropped for most people in cities. 

Britain’s “dark Satanic Mills”

We can thank the Industrial Revolution for many of the products and technological advances we enjoy today, such as cotton underwear. But for the people living through it, the Industrial Revolution was dehumanizing and depressing. The poet William Blake called British factories “these dark Satanic Mills.” He was not alone in expressing horror at industrialization. The German Friedrich Engels felt that English workers were not treated as human beings. He wrote, “They were merely toiling machines in the service of the few aristocrats who had guided history down to that time.” In other words, the Industrial Revolution improved conditions for a few at the expense of the many.

The Industrial Revolution also destroyed communities and culture. Millions of people moved to cities to work in factories, disrupting community life in rural areas. Traditional extended families were replaced by nuclear families, which are families that include only parents and children. In these times, the families were often just the mother and children. Nuclear families did not provide the same stability as extended families, resulting in less support during hard times. This led to increased levels of poverty and homelessness.

The breaking up of family networks and the rise of factories endangered children and unmarried women. Early nineteenth-century England had more than a million child laborers. Many grew up in orphanages and then went to work in workhouses. Historian Jane Humphries estimates that up to 15 percent of England’s industrial workforce were children. Some children were forced to work for no money in exchange for food and a bed.

Women’s lives were changed as production moved out of homes and into factories. In rural England, women spun textiles for use at home and for sale at the market. Women also worked in agriculture and domestic service. The Industrial Revolution didn’t really change the work women did, just where they did it. One of the few opportunities for women was to work in factories, often in textile production. Married women often left the workforce, either because their husbands demanded it or because of the lack of opportunities apart from factory work.

Social mobility

The Industrial Revolution did offer new opportunities for people. For some, working in factories provided a chance at social mobility and financial freedom.

The brutal working conditions of the Industrial Revolution caused many to fight for social progress. Britain became the wealthiest nation on Earth. British workers, politicians, and writers started looking around and wondering why—in the world’s richest country— so many people lived and worked in poor conditions. Reformers fought for a minimum wage, safe working conditions, and an eight-hour work day. They also argued for children to be educated instead of being forced to work. Unfortunately, these reforms often did not reach Britain’s colonies.

Industrialized sugar comes home

Production and profit in England relied on exploiting workers in other parts of the world to bring in raw materials. To understand this, let’s consider the impact of the Industrial Revolution on three global commodities: sugar, wheat, and copper.

You’ve read about how Europeans brought sugarcane from Southeast Asia to the Caribbean. They forced enslaved people there to harvest and refine that sugar. Then, the British government outlawed the slave trade in the early 1800s. This meant that Caribbean sugar plantations, which relied on forced labor, became less profitable. European colonizers turned their focus back to Southeast Asia. The Dutch forced colonized people to farm sugar. They built sugar factories on an industrial scale in the Dutch East Indies (today’s Indonesia). Sugar became cheaper and the Europeans made greater profits. Workers in Southeast Asia were exploited for their labor, while Caribbean economies were devastated by the decline in sugar prices.

Wheat-fueled industrialization

Coal powered machines, but it was wheat that powered the workers. English demand for wheat revolutionized wheat production in the nineteenth century.

In the early nineteenth century, bread prices soared. This created unrest in Britain’s cities, where a bunch of working-class people now lived and depended on cheap bread. If they wanted to keep factories open, the British needed cheap bread. Their efforts to import more wheat transformed wheat-producing regions around the world, including Russia, Argentina, and California.

British capitalists funded the construction of railroads in Russia. In Argentina, the British funded new ports and railroads. In California, nearly all wheat exports made the 17,000-mile sea voyage from San Francisco to Liverpool, England. This profitable exchange turned gold miners into wheat farmers and vast stretches of inner California became wheat fields.

Conclusion

The sugar, wheat, and copper industries all depended on British steam engines, financial systems, and wage laborers. They reached people from different parts of the world. British children in factories, colonized people farming sugar, peasants of southern Russia, and thousands of forced and free workers who smelted copper were all affected. In each case, the global connections created by the Industrial Revolution had far-reaching effects. They changed local communities, trade networks, and the lives of workers.